“Selling Out for Sustainability? Neoliberal governance, agency and professional careers in the sustainable palm oil sector”
New paper by @Izadel and myself out now in @journalofpoliticalecology. It’s a critical exploration of the world of “sustainable #PalmOil” and the interactions between consultancies, NGOs, finance and corporations as well as individual career choices. 1/2
2/2 Through this focus, we hope to make a new contribution to understanding the corporate sustainability drive - in particular the role of #Consultancies, so key in all this but rarely studied as a phenomenon in themselves.
3/2 The paper is part of a Special Section on the #PoliticalEcology of professionals, originally a panel at Pollen 2020 @poleconet, organised by Sam Staddon, @FlorianeClement and Bimbika Sijapati Basnett. Thank you!
And just wanted to add that for me it's also one of several attempts to think through the perennial question: change from inside or outside? As ever, our answer is both. #EverythingEverywhereAllAtOnce
Your (very interesting!) paper gave me the shivers.
Also realizing the power of institutionalized neoliberalism to absorb and pacify intentions of change. Good that you found that not everything is in vain: that there are also positive results from the activities of the people in the belly of the beast.
Your conclusions:
"Most eco-socialist, political ecologist critics
argue that this makes complete system change all the more crucial, as there is simply not enough time for the
slow, incremental changes of "sustainability" policies; that capitalism and growth are the real problem and need
to be tackled. Others argue the opposite: as Noam Chomsky put it in a recent interview, "we don't have time to
totally overturn capitalism" (Chomsky the pragmatist here!).8 Whilst they seem to head in opposite directions,
to us, both of these positions or strategies are correct and necessary. Sustainability professionals need to
continue working within corporations and changing practices and approaches from within.."
In the end, I would have liked some kind of reality-check with an assessment of the real impact of RSPO on the sustainability of palm oil production. As the study collects mainly the views of the people working for change (therefore I would expect them to see their work as positive, at least as a coping mechanism) and with the neoliberal brainwashing in action (as you explain very nicely in your article), I would expect general bias towards "RSPO indeed changes things".
(off the record: If you were asking an environmental NGO it could also be that they exxagerate the negative aspects, as part of the dynamics).
Anyway. Congrats, I wish you to have a lot of success with this publication!
I forgot: As you end your paper mentioning strategies for change:
I attended yesterday the inspiring talk by Ekaterina Chertkovskaya organized by @UCPH_Degrowth .
Ekaterina presented a very accurate outline of strategies for degrowth. Change from the inside vs change from the outsinde was of course also a topic. Might be interesting for you.
They told us the presentation would be recorded 😃
Oh thank you - that sounds great! I hope there will be recording. And thank you also for your previous comments, regarding potential bias - yes, definitely; and there is a lot more to say about actual impact of RSPO. It was beyond scope of this paper (and the research we did for it), but am aware of this shortcoming! There will be more scope in the book 😊
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